Product description

This is one of the world's greatest stories of adventure, survival and escape. SlavomirRawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 9th November 1939, he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation in Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison and a farce of a trial, he was sentenced to 25 years' hard labour in the Gulags, for 'spying'. After a three-month journey to Siberia in the depths of winter, he escaped with six companions, realising that to stay in the camp meant almost certain death. In June 1941, they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and, finally, freedom nine months later in March 1942, after travelling on foot for 4,000 miles through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert. By the end, he weighed just five stone and 3 of the 7 had died.

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In 2004 a remarkable man died. His name was Slavomir Rawicz, who in 1955 wrote a true account of his escape in 1941 from a Siberian Labour Camp and the epic and gruelling journey which followed.

Slav's account started in the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, as he was sentenced to 25 years' hard labour for "spying", after the 12 months of interrogation that had followed his arrest in November 1939. He and thousands of others were transported in open cattle trucks, in sub-zero temperatures, to the end of the line at Irkutsk. They were chained together, and force-marched hundreds of miles to Camp 303 - which the survivors had to build from scratch.

In April 1941, Slav and six others escaped in a blizzard. They walked 4,000 miles south, living off the land, through the Gobi desert and over the Himalayas, until they reached India and were rescued by a Gurkha patrol. The dream of freedom had seen them overcome bitter cold, sweltering heat, thirst, starvation and injury. Sadly three of them died on the way. This gripping book holds the reader from the first page to the last as this story of triumph over seemingly impossible odds unfolds.